Avoiding bad colorspace conversions/10bit codecs

Rain Mooder wrote on 6/27/2009, 9:49 AM

Hi all. I need to pass an intermediate between Vegas and After Effects at the highest quality available I'm trying to figure out a way to make it worth doing the switch from 8 bit processing to float 32 bit.

My problem with Vegas is that if I use a good intermediate like HuffyUV or Lararith, Vegas will almost always present the codec with 8bit RGB and not 8bit YUV. This means that the codec does a lossy 8bit RGB to 8bit YUV conversion when Vegas could of done a less lossy float 32 bit RGB to 8 bit YUV conversion.

For me, this poor conversion forced in the codec negates much of the value of editing in 32 bit float. If I want to edit DV, send to AE and bring it back for some more edits I'm going to get a lot of rounding error due to low-bit depth color conversions.

The Sony 10 but YUV codec will do the conversion correctly but for whatever other reasons the codec looks awful to me.

Are there any decent codecs (?Blackmagic?) that Vegas will present a full 10bit YUV or a 32bit float RGB to?

Comments

farss wrote on 6/27/2009, 7:13 PM

The Sony YUV codec seems almost identical to the BMD codec.
In what way does it look aweful and how are you handling Vegas in 32bit. This and other information on Glenn's site might hold the clue:

http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/vegas-9-levels.htm

Bob.

GlennChan wrote on 6/28/2009, 6:22 PM

The 10-bit sonyYUV codec will have 10 bits of performance I believe, but perhaps not in After Effects.

The uncompressed codec, when in a 32-bit project, will have 32 bits of precision. *There may be a bug with it. The scopes may have possible errors converting from 32bit->8bit so that might be confusing if that is the case.
But again, I don't think After Effects will see 32-bit from an uncompressed file produced from Vegas.

2- Are you seeing problems? I wouldn't worry about rounding error unless working with computer generated material that has no noise.